The X Factor liveblog - seventh results show

The X Factor: will Craig Colton get the chop? Photograph: Ken McKay/Rex Features

Good evening, and welcome to the X Factor liveblog: the shriekquel. The bad news is that it's not Movie Night any more. The good news is that I've had time to do some research about Set It Off. It's apparently a 1996 crime thriller starring Will Smith's wife and Dr Dre. It won the Best Director award at the 1997 Acapulco Black Film Festival, it has a 63% rating on Rottentomatoes, and the bloke from Scrubs goes "NO! No more KILLIN'!" in the trailer. I hope this helps.

Anyway, this is an extra special edition of the results show. You're not just kicking an act out of X Factor this week - you're stopping an act from singing two songs next week. Two songs, where the contestants will try and showcase different sides of their personalities by singing a fast song and then a slow song. Do you want Marcus to sing a slow song? Do you want Janet to sing a fast song? Really? After she massacred I Want You Back The Other week? This is the sort of rationale you need to work on tonight. Or, you know, don't vote for anybody at all. I don't actually care.

Still, it's business as usual tonight. I'll liveblog the unfolding horrors up here, you'll invariably be much funnier than me in the comments and at the end we'll all collapse in a horrified pile together. Sound good? See you at 8pm, then.

7.37pm: I forget to mention in the intro - tonight's guest performers are Rihanna and Rebecca Ferguson. I'm personally quite excited about this. After Wagner, Rebecca Ferguson was my favourite contestant last year, and last time Rihanna appeared on X Factor she took most of her clothes off. This is hopefully going to be a winning throwback to when X Factor was allowed to have attractive people on it.

7.49pm: We are all watching The Cube, aren't we? I love this show. I've still got problems with the name - my three potential replacements are Dimwit Krypton Factor, Greenhouse Of Idiots and Hug The Judderman - but I still love it. Actually, love's a strong word. I still watch bits of it before X Factor starts. There, that's better.

8.02pm: Here we go. No dance from Dermot tonight. He's all danced out from last night, poor thing. Plus tonight is too important for dancing. Plus it's the holy day. Plus Dermot is terrible at dancing. That's all.

LOUIS: Not as pensive this week. Louis has got nothing to lose. He's dangerous, like a wolf on a rollerskate.

TULISA: Today's tattoo is basically the Wikipedia entry for Think by Aretha Franklin. She's not making that mistake again.

KELLY: Slowly becoming a genuine fashion icon. See how this week she's wearing two binbags and a pair of tights. That's gold right there.

GARY: You know, I think I preferred it when Gary Barlow just turned up on X Factor to sing The Flood six times an episode.

8.05pm: It's time for the group performance. We're promised a modern a classic, but they contestants seem to be singing that horrible song by Bryan Adams and Sporty Spice. Maybe they're doing the modern classic afterwards.

8.08pm: So far so awful. Amelia Lily is wearing a hat. Marcus keeps pointing at his own head like he's just noticed it exists. Oh wait, there's a surprise special guest - it's the corpse of Bryan Adams, playing a guitar and trying to out-bellow Amelia Lily. Yeah, good luck with that, foul spectre.

8.09pm: The corpse of Bryan Adams tells the contestants to write their own music and play live as often as they can. He's either never seen an episode of X Factor before, or his sense of irony has evolved beyond the point of human recognition.

8.13pm: Interminable recap time. Backstage last night, Gary and Louis had a fight, Tulisa pulled a funny face, Gary and Louis have another fight, Kelly Rowland suffers some kind of terrible fit, Misha B cries a lot and then Gary and Louis don't have a fight. I can only assume that this is an oversight on the part of X Factor.

8.15pm: Recap done, it's Awkward Contestant Banter time. Little Mix pull a funny face, Misha looks quite happy, Janet says the word 'yes', Amelia says "I don't want to go because I just came back" for the BILLIONTH time and Craig says that he thinks he's going home. Do whatever you like with this information.

8.17pm: And now it's time for Rebecca Ferguson's guest performance. In a bizarre break from X Factor tradition, her debut single is actually quite good. It's also quite quiet, which confuses the X Factor studio audience. They've been conditioned to expect a couple of explosions every couple of minutes, or else they get antsy. Hopefully producers will remedy this by blowing up some dustbins in the next ad break.

8.19pm: Listen to this song, and how Rebecca sings it. Now look at Matt Cardle, the swivel-eyed, ballad-massacring, success-hating conspiracy theorist who beat Rebecca to the X Factor title last year. If you voted for Matt Cardle, I'm judging you relentlessly at the moment. In other news, I'd quite like Rebecca Ferguson to marry me, please.

8.20pm: That said, I don't know if I love Rebecca Ferguson or her spectacular fondness for plinths the most. It might be the plinths. Maybe I should marry a plinth.

8.23pm: Voiceover man, moonlighting on an advert, has just shouted "LOVE CHRISTMAS? LOVE LEE EVANS!" I didn't realise the two things were mutually exclusive. I guess that means I should probably stop loving Christmas, then. That's a disappointment.

8.26pm: Kelly Rowland just said "We're all in a position where we could go home at any time". That's Kelly Rowland who did actually go home a few weeks ago, so at least she knows what she's talking about.

8.27pm: And now for Rihanna, who was introduced with a title card reading "Over 1.7 billion YouTube hits". That makes her nearly as popular as that sneezing panda, by my calculation.

8.30pm: Rihanna, standing next to a giant chair for reasons that are legitimately beyond me, is singing We Found Love In A Hopeless Place; possibly the most successful song ever to be written about Chatham. And she's keeping her clothes on, too, which is a bold new experiment for her.

Also, since her last appearance, Rihanna has discovered how to hold the microphone by her side and keep her mouth shut and still somehow manage to perfectly sing her song. I don't know how she does this, but I'm willing to bet that witchcraft plays a part.

8.33pm: After the song finishes, Rihanna embarks on a long, meandering anecdote about her album and when her album's out and what her album's called and how much she wants to live in Britain because she loves Britain. And, to his credit, Dermot O'Leary pulls EXACTLY the same face that did when Kitty snatched his microphone and yelled Born This Way last week. He's consistent. I like that.

8.37pm: Have any of you actually done that Talk Talk webcam animation thing, by the way? Do any of you actually know anybody who's done that Talk Talk webcam animation thing? I don't think anyone has really done it in real life, ever. Although I think that one of you should do it next week. In an ironic way, of course. Or drunk. One of you do the Talk Talk webcam animation thing drunk next week, basically.

8.38pm: Time for the results. This is exciting. Or whatever the precise scientific opposite of exciting is. One or the other.

8.39pm: Misha B is through. That epic sob story worked last night, then. Who knew?

8.40pm: Little Mix are also through. A collective cheer just went up from the plinth manufacturers of this country. Also, Marcus is through.

8.40pm: And finally Janet is through. It's a sing-off between Craig and Amelia. This is going to be awful close.

8.43pm: So who'll go? On one hand, Craig has been talked up as a potential winner since the start of the live finals. On the other hand, M&S just spent all that time re-editing its Christmas advert so that Amelia sings almost all of it. But Bryan Adams said that he likes Amelia. But Bryan Adams hasn't said anything worth listening to for several years. But Gary spent all that money on slimming Craig down. Oh, I'm so confused.

8.45pm: Amelia vs Craig. A dodgy Christina Aguilera wannabe vs a dodgy Adele wannabe. If Craig goes we'll never see that horrible sexface again. But if Amelia goes we'll never hear "I don't want to go because I just got back" every 15 seconds any more. Maybe, just maybe, we should get rid of both of them and save ourselves a lot of trouble.

8.48pm: Craig's up first. He looks genuinely heartbroken. And he's singing... oh, not an Adele song. That's new. He's singing Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, to which the answer is almost definitely 'not really, Craig, sorry'.

He's singing this in a very Craig way, in that it sounds like a Susan Boyle record slowed down by about 250 percent. It's a brave gamble - the judges might not be able to save him because they might have all slit their wrists by the time he stops singing.

8.51pm: And now for Amelia, who has changed but is still wearing her funny hat. It's about this time that she's probably regretting the fact that nobody has ever written a song called I Don't Want To Go Because I Just Got Back.

She's singing well. This could be close. The judges might have more loyalty to Craig, but Amelia's song isn't ridiculously depressing. I have no idea which way this will go.

8.52pm: First judge to make a decision is Gary Barlow. He sends Amelia home and is booed wildly by the entire audience.

8.54pm: So it's down to the public. And, officially, the act that the British public cares least about is Craig. Amelia lives to wail another day.

8.56pm: And now, sadly, we get to see Craig best bits. They go sexface, biscuit factory, bad haircut, better haircut, sexface, sexface, sexface, better haircut, gigantic sexface. Those are all of Craig's best bits, but thankfully he doesn't grab Dermot's microphone and scream anything directly into a camera. For that I am eternally grateful.

8.57pm: And that's that for another week. Poor old Criag won't get to sing two songs next week. And he'll probably get to turn on some regional Christmas lights in the provinces next week, too. See? It's a win-win for everyone. Next week, X Factor goes back to being almost two hours long, so make the most of the next few days. And, for the love of all that's holy, be sure to follow me on Twitter (@StuHeritage), especially if you like hearing brief stories about vomit. See you next week! GUMMO!

About this article

The X Factor liveblog - seventh results show

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 15.57 EST on Sunday 20 November 2011.
It was last modified at 19.10 EDT on Tuesday 3 June 2014.
It was first published at 14.30 EST on Sunday 20 November 2011.